Background: The increasing number of daily published articles in the biomedical domain has become too large for humans to handle on their own. As a result, bio-text mining technologies have been developed to improve their workload by automatically analysing the text and extracting important knowledge. Specific bio-entities, bio-events between these and facts can now be recognised with sufficient accuracy and are widely used by biomedical researchers. However, understanding how the extracted facts are connected in text is an extremely difficult task, which cannot be easily tackled by machinery.
Results: In this article, we describe our method to recognise causal triggers and their arguments in biomedical scientific discourse. We introduce new features and show that a self-learning approach improves the performance obtained by supervised machine learners to 83.47% for causal triggers. Furthermore, the spans of causal arguments can be recognised to a slightly higher level that by using supervised or rule-based methods that have been employed before.
Conclusion: Exploiting the large amount of unlabelled data that is already available can help improve the performance of recognising causal discourse relations in the biomedical domain. This improvement will further benefit the development of multiple tasks, such as hypothesis generation for experimental laboratories, contradiction detection, and the creation of causal networks.